In a Constantly Plugged-In World, It’s Not All Bad to Be Bored

I SPENT five unexpected hours in an airport this Thanksgiving holiday when our plane had mechanical difficulties and we had to wait for another plane to arrive. So I had plenty of time to think about the subject of boredom.

I won’t lie to you. Half a day in an airport waiting for a flight is pretty tedious, even with the distractions of books, magazines and iPhones (not to mention duty-free shopping).

But increasingly, some academics and child development experts are coming out in praise of boredom.

It’s all right for us — and our children — to be bored on occasion, they say. It forces the brain to go on interesting tangents, perhaps fostering creativity. And because most of us are almost consistently plugged into one screen or another these days, we don’t experience the benefits of boredom.

So should we embrace boredom?

Yes. And no. But I’ll get back to that.

First of all, like many people, I assumed that boredom was a relatively recent phenomenon, with the advent of more leisure time. Not so, says Peter Toohey, a professor of Greek and Roman history at the University of Calgary in Canada and the author of “Boredom: A Lively History” (Yale University Press, 2011).

Then there’s the question of how we define boredom. The trouble is that it has been defined, and discussed, in many different ways, said John D. Eastwood, an associate professor of psychology at York University in Ontario, Canada.

After looking over the research literature and putting the idea in front of a focus group of about 100 people, Professor Eastwood and his colleagues defined boredom as an experience of “wanting to, but being unable to engage in satisfying activity.”

What separates boredom from apathy, he said, is that the person is not engaged but wants to be. With apathy, he said, there is no urge to do something.

The core experience of boredom, he said, is “disruption of the attention process, associated with a low mood and a sense that time is passing slowly.”

Boredom can sound an awful lot like depression. But Professor Eastwood said that while they can be related, people who are bored tend to see the problem as the environment or the world, while people who are depressed see the problem as themselves.

Sometimes we think we’re bored when we just have difficulty concentrating. In their study, “The Unengaged Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention,” which appeared in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science in September, Professor Eastwood and his colleagues pointed to an earlier experiment in which participants listened to a tape of a person reading a magazine article.

Some groups heard a loud and unrelated television program in the next room, others heard it at a low level so it was barely noticeable, while the third group didn’t hear the soundtrack at all.

The ones who heard the low-level TV reported more boredom than the other two groups — they had difficulty concentrating but were not sure why, and attributed that difficulty to boredom.

When you’re trying to focus on a difficult or engaging task, disruption of attention can lead to boredom, said Mark J. Fenske, an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Guelph in Ontario and one of the authors of the study.

On the other hand, when you’re doing something dull, “such as looking for bad widgets on a factory line, distracting music can help you not be bored.”

In fact, he said, we now know that squirming and doodling, often seen as a sign of boredom, can actually help combat it by keeping people more physically alert.

“Research shows that kids who are allowed to fidget learn more and retain more information than those who are forced to sit still,” Professor Fenske said.

We all experience boredom at some points — my flight delay, a droning speaker, a particularly tedious movie. But some individuals are more likely to be bored than others. To help measure this, researchers developed a “Boredom Proneness Scale” in the 1980s.

The scale includes questions like, “Many things I have to do are repetitive and monotonous,” and “I have so many interests, I don’t have time to do everything.”

Using such scales, researchers have discovered that boys tend to be bored more often than girls, said Stephen Vodanovich, a professor of psychology at the University of West Florida, especially when it comes needing more, and a variety of, external stimulation.

But in general, teenagers are a pretty jaded lot. In 1991, Reed Larson, a professor of human and community development at the University of Illinois, conducted an experiment in which he contacted almost 400 teenagers and their parents seven to eight times a day by beeper. He found that 32 percent of adolescents said they were bored in school and doing homework, while 23 percent said they were bored when they weren’t in school.

On the other hand, 3 percent of parents said they were bored.

Professor Larson said he did not know whether the boredom percentages now, 21 years later, would be higher or lower. But he said he did know that “adolescence is a peak period for boredom,” largely because children and teenagers are not given a lot of control over what they want to do.

So back to my original question: Is boredom good for you?

Sometimes no, because in its extreme it can lead people to take absurd physical risks, gamble or indulge in substance abuse as a way to ease it, research shows.

On the other hand, many philosophers and writers discuss the connection between boredom and creativity, said Professor Vodanovich, who has been studying the issue for more than two decades.

“Boredom is the brain’s way to tell you you should be doing something else,” said Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at N.Y.U. “But the brain doesn’t always know the most appropriate thing to do. If you’re bored and use that energy to play guitar and cook, it will make you happy. But if you watch TV, it may make you happy in the short term, but not in the long term.”

So if your child is bored and you give him an iPad, he may not be bored anymore, but he hasn’t learned how to entertain himself, or self regulate, Professor Fenske said.

And “that self-regulation transfers from one situation to other,” he said. “Your kid doesn’t just learn to entertain himself, but gets more self-control in other areas.”

I don’t think we really want to celebrate boredom. Nor should we be too critical of it. Rather, our goal should be to feel comfortable away from the constant chatter of activity and technology.

Professor Eastwood agreed.

“We frame it as we need to be bored more, but boredom is an agonizing, restless desire to be connected with something meaningful,” he said. What people are really searching for, he said, is a way to unplug and enjoy down time.

“In an environment where we are constantly overstimulated,” he said, “it’s hard to find ways to engage when the noise shuts down.”

E-mail: shortcuts@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on December 1, 2012, on Page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Why, in a Constantly Plugged-In World, It’s Not All Bad to Be Bored. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe